To Become a Lion
2024 · 6m
Directed by David Ma
Genres: biography, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
A Chinese-Australian filmmaker raised in Sydney’s Chinatown reflects on the lion dances of his childhood and his immigrant parents’ sacrifices, in a documentary commissioned by the Powerhouse Museum.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A museum-commissioned doc about lion dances and filial piety is exactly the kind of safe, earnest memoir that bores me—except Ma's actually cracked something here about mythmaking and immigrant debt that refuses to resolve neatly, which is the only reason I'm not dismissing it outright.
Ma positions this in the lineage of essayistic portraiture (Wong Kar-wai's visual language, Trinh T. Minh-ha's layered narration) while honoring the lion dance as both domestic ritual and formal motif—the kind of formally conscious memorial that understands its own stakes.
The decision to let the lion dance itself do the emotional work rather than underscoring it with swelling music is what elevates this from family archive to something genuinely moving—a formal restraint that trusts the image and the performer to carry the weight.